Untransformed

A distribution transformer, much, say, like an elevator, is easy to ignore until it malfunctions. Its unromantic job, in most cases, is to take the high-voltage current transmitted over the grid and convert it—or step it down—to the lower-voltage current that emerges from a wall socket. There are an estimated three million distribution transformers in operation in the United States, and virtually all the electricity produced in the country—some four trillion kilowatt hours per year—passes through at least one of them en route from the plant where it was generated to the heating element in your toaster. Along the way, some energy is inevitably lost, and even though proportionately these losses are small, when you’re talking about four trillion kilowatt hours they quickly add up.

Last month, more than fourteen years after Congress mandated transformer standards, the Bush Administration finally got around to proposing them. (The original deadline was missed during the Clinton Administration.) To prepare the proposal, the Department of Energy assessed six possible levels of efficiency, ranging from the highest, known in bureaucratese as Trial Standard Level 6, to the lowest, Trial Standard Level 1. According to the department’s figures, the ideal balance between the up-front costs and the long-term gains was achieved at Level 4. Nevertheless, the department turned around and recommended a much lower transformer standard, Level 2. The decision obviously makes no sense on environmental grounds—in effect, the department is proposing to squander some twelve billion kilowatt hours per year, or roughly enough electricity to power all the households in Iowa—and also no sense on financial ones: the D.O.E.’s own analysis shows that the net cost of the lower standard will actually be higher over the life of the average transformer, which is estimated to be thirty years. The proposal leaves “billions in savings just sitting on the table,” is how Steven Nadel, the executive director of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, put it to the Christian Science Monitor.

As it happens, right around the same time that the Bush Administration was making its feeble goals public, three thousand miles away, in Sacramento, California, ambitious new standards were being set. The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 may well be the most important piece of legislation passed this year; certainly it is the most far-sighted. When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs it, as he has promised to do by the end of next week, California will become the first place in America where climate change is truly taken seriously. The act commits the state to cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010—an eleven-per-cent reduction from “business as usual”—and to 1990 levels by 2020: a twenty-nine-per-cent reduction. Significantly, the bill does not depend on voluntary compliance but authorizes the California Air Resources Board to take any steps necessary to enforce the limits. Peter Darbee, the head of the state’s largest utility, P.G. & E., whose support was crucial to the bill’s passage, said he welcomed the strictness of the regulations as a spur to innovation. “The incentives really aren’t there for the creation of new technologies and investments to reduce carbon dioxide unless mandatory caps are put in place,” he told the Times.

California’s actions have nothing to do with the Department of Energy’s, and, of course, everything to do with them. Six years ago, when George W. Bush was running for President, he called global warming a serious problem, and pledged, if elected, to regulate CO? emissions. Practically his first move after taking office was to break that pledge. In the years since, his only actions on climate change have been to block, blunt, and subvert the well-meaning efforts of others. Currently, for example, California is trying to impose new auto-emissions standards that would cover greenhouse gases like CO? and methane. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is fighting the requirements in court, and the Bush Administration, which California asked for help in implementing the rules, has instead come down on the side of the carmakers. (A couple of years ago, the Administration helped kill California’s “zero emission vehicle” mandate.)

President Bush likes to portray himself as a man of unwavering optimism. “And so we move forward—optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause, and confident of the victories to come,” he declared at the close of his most recent State of the Union address. “Ours is an agenda that is optimistic,” he told the Republican National Governors Association the following month. “We believe in America. We believe in the ingenuity of the American people.” “We’re really an optimistic people,” he recently informed the Australian Prime Minister. Of all the many ingenious American things this President is optimistic about, technology is supposedly near the top of the list. “And technology will once again make this country the leader in the world, and that’s what we’re here to celebrate,” he told a group of Californians this past Earth Day.

Just about every decision that the Administration has made on energy policy belies these claims. If you examine Bush’s record, you find that the technologies he supports are either those which were developed in the past—coal mining and oil drilling—or those which lie securely in the future: cars and buses that zip around on hydrogen. When presented with new technologies that could actually change the way Americans live in the here and now, the White House wants nothing to do with them. Methods currently exist, for instance, to cut mercury emissions from power plants by as much as ninety per cent; the Administration is uninterested. Similarly, there are already (Japanese-made) cars on the road that comfortably seat a family of five and get more than fifty miles to the gallon. Yet it is only in recent months that the White House has begun to investigate the possibility of raising fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, which have languished at twenty-seven and a half miles per gallon for the past twenty years. The new transformer rules are the first efficiency goals the Bush Administration has proposed; meanwhile, the D.O.E. has missed deadlines to raise standards for equipment ranging from dishwashers to fluorescent-lamp ballasts (and has been sued by fifteen states for its negligence). This is not the record of a technological optimist, of someone who believes in the “ingenuity of the American people.” This is the record of a pessimist.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.